Once I saw a delightful little puzzle that involved guessing famous places and landmarks based on a (somewhat) descriptive phrase that - admire the clever intricacy here! - began with the same letters. For example:
Staunch Old Lady (Statue Of Liberty)
Big Humps (Black Hills)
I wish I could dig up that puzzle and play it again. I can remember only a few:
Great Crack
Giant Parallelograms
Commons Paramount
It annoys me how some words lose their meaning through constant misuse. There are thousands of examples of this, but the one to arouse my particular ire is the instance of specified use, where a word that really means so much more is relegated to the inglorious task of holding down only one job. I thought of three examples earlier, and have already managed to forget one, but the other two are:
-Slavery (involuntary servitude without wages; it's been around for millennia, and emerged in countless cultures, yet today it's almost synonymous with the importation of African slaves to the ante-bellum American South).
-Moon (generic satellite or orb; yet the word practically means the waning and waxing one we see in the sky).
Wednesday, June 01, 2005
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2 comments:
Well, there's always "nice," which Jane Austen uses in several different ways... and not all of them nice. We use it in only one sense now. (I'm re-reading Persuasion, definitely less-polished than her other novels... seeing as she died before she could edit it... and extremely wordy, but always and forever delightful.)
Yes, there's also the issue of words taking on too much meaning. I think Tilney's 'nice' just about takes the cake.
I never could bring myself to like Persuasion much, perhaps because the heroine was Twenty-Seven.
~Rose
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